Paisley gone to his eternal reward

[naka]

No grieving in my house

[BennyHarp]

No grieving in my house

+1 Pretty much sums up my feelings.

[seafoid]

Good article seafoid


The compact with Sinn Féin provoked few defections and prompted hardline supporters to query why he had not reached the same political compromise 40 years earlier – an act that might have sidestepped the mayhem and misery of the Troubles. The question that may never be satisfactorily answered is whether Paisley was the chief fomenter of Protestant alarm, or merely a larger-than-life reflection of it.

He may have condemned violence and taken extraordinary pains to avoid getting caught up in it, but he stirred, inflamed, ranted and terrified loyalists into believing that their heritage and their very lives were threatened. In the end, critics alleged, it was lust for power and a more imposing place in history that secured his conversion to the cause of political compromise. His belated commitment to cross-community cooperation, however, suggested that, like McGuinness, he had learned lessons during an extraordinary political odyssey.

It reminds me of this song, what happened to the communities that did the dying.
Paisley didn't care about working class communities other than using them for political aims

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWUsSawPeVg
Sons of their fathers dream the same dream
The sound of forbidden words becomes a scream
Voices in anger, victims of history
Plundered and set aside, grown fat on swallowed pride

With promises of paradise and gifts of beads and knives
Missionaries and pioneers are soldiers in disguise
Saviours and conquerors they make us wait
The fishers of men they wave their truth like bait

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/aug/28/northern-ireland-peace-poverty-ira-ceasefire

[saffron sam2]

No grieving in my house

Nor mine.

He is largely responsible for many innocent people from our community lying in their graves tonight.
A despicable human being that the world really could have been doing without. His death today, in his old age, is completely meaningless to me tbh. His evil deeds were already completed. God rest his victims.

+1 as they say.

[bcarrier]

The crux of it is this

Was Paisley the chief  fomenter of Protestant alarm, or merely a larger-than-life reflection of it.


I'd be surprised if there wasn't some other Cnut who wouldn't have taken his place in early 70s.

For avoidance of doubt note words "other Cnut" above.

[Tony Baloney]

No grieving in my house

Nor mine.

He is largely responsible for many innocent people from our community lying in their graves tonight.
A despicable human being that the world really could have been doing without. His death today, in his old age, is completely meaningless to me tbh. His evil deeds were already completed. God rest his victims.

+1 as they say.

Same as that. See you in another while SS.

[5 Sams]

No grieving in my house

Nor mine.

He is largely responsible for many innocent people from our community lying in their graves tonight.
A despicable human being that the world really could have been doing without. His death today, in his old age, is completely meaningless to me tbh. His evil deeds were already completed. God rest his victims.

+1 as they say.

I was gonna put up a cupla focal but I cant do any better than this HS. There was a load of shite going about how good he was as an local MP helping local people no matter who they were. Dung. I curted a girl in the 80s from Ballymena whos family were involved with All Saints. The oul bollox didn't stop his buddies putting glass in the goalmouths in their pitch despite many approaches. Load of other stuff that I could go into but couldn't be arsed. Go raibh an cloch is isle san fharraige mar adhairt d'a cheann.

[Fairhead]

Weeping Willie was on Newsline earlier and gave a powerful performance. He said he loved the Big Man so expect a tribute song out soon by the bould Willie!

Hard to stomach the headlines on the news today about the peacemaker and the statesman when for the previous 40 years he spewed out vile hatred towards Catholics and as someone else said today sent many a young protestant off on the path to jail with his oratory skills.

[ONeill]

What was hard to understand was his unchristian christianity.

In those interviews he gave a year ago he was able to recall a lot when it came to the dirty deeds Robinson et al were pulling. He was unable to recall anything pre-2006 of note if it possibly meant being accountable for others.

[Mike Sheehy]

Good article seafoid


The compact with Sinn Féin provoked few defections and prompted hardline supporters to query why he had not reached the same political compromise 40 years earlier – an act that might have sidestepped the mayhem and misery of the Troubles. The question that may never be satisfactorily answered is whether Paisley was the chief fomenter of Protestant alarm, or merely a larger-than-life reflection of it.

He may have condemned violence and taken extraordinary pains to avoid getting caught up in it, but he stirred, inflamed, ranted and terrified loyalists into believing that their heritage and their very lives were threatened. In the end, critics alleged, it was lust for power and a more imposing place in history that secured his conversion to the cause of political compromise. His belated commitment to cross-community cooperation, however, suggested that, like McGuinness, he had learned lessons during an extraordinary political odyssey.

It reminds me of this song, what happened to the communities that did the dying.
Paisley didn't care about working class communities other than using them for political aims

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWUsSawPeVg
Sons of their fathers dream the same dream
The sound of forbidden words becomes a scream
Voices in anger, victims of history
Plundered and set aside, grown fat on swallowed pride

With promises of paradise and gifts of beads and knives
Missionaries and pioneers are soldiers in disguise
Saviours and conquerors they make us wait
The fishers of men they wave their truth like bait

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/aug/28/northern-ireland-peace-poverty-ira-ceasefire

Paisley was a hateful, bigoted, sectarian ****.  Just like you , Seafoid.

[balladmaker]

As the saying goes ... 'When you're dead, you're great'

I find it difficult to contain my anger when I listen to the tributes on TV tonight to 'the peacemaker'.

He built his career on the deaths and misery of the working class communities, his supreme oratory skills sent many a young Protestant to a prison cell or to their grave, his bigotry and blatant incitement of hatred towards Catholics, sent many an innocent Catholic to their grave. He created division at every opportunity, and profited from the deaths and misery that his bigoted incitement were responsible for. 

Let no one forget his role since the late 60's to the early 00's, and that Ian Paisley's near death epiphany of recent years can in no way wash away the destruction that he had a major role in fuelling during the previous 40 years.  His lust for power and thoughts of his legacy were all that made him go into power with Sinn Féin. I hope he is now being judged by his maker.

[Eamonnca1]

[seafoid]

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/ian-paisley-a-firebrand-who-learned-to-compromise-1.1927598

In 2006, about a year before Ian Paisley stunned the world by going into government with Sinn Féin, I was talking to a clearly troubled senior member of his two organisations – the Democratic Unionist Party and the Free Presbyterian Church.
He told me privately that he felt that his leader was grappling with a profound dilemma: "There's a conflict between our politics and our theology. Our politics tell us that we must never relent on our opposition to Sinn Féin/IRA. But our theology tells us that Jesus Christ will forgive all sins for those who repent. We're torn between the need to hold the line politically and the idea of redemption that is at the heart of our faith."
Liberals, he said, could never understand that Ian Paisley and those who followed him really took their faith seriously, and that its demands might propel them into places they would not otherwise dream of going.
He was right, of course: Ian Paisley and Paisleyism were a closed book, not just to Irish Catholics but to British and European politicians.
The infamous episode of Paisley trying to howl down Pope John Paul II in the European Parliament in 1988, bellowing about the Antichrist, is instructive for the disgust on the faces of the parliamentarians. Paisley seemed, as in some respects he was, a throwback to the horrific religious wars of the 17th century from which modern Europe itself emerged. The huge roaring hulk of this rabble-rousing preacher was a nightmare figure from the repressed memory of the Thirty Years War.
There was only one thing to do with him – get him out as fast as possible.
Sectarian bigotry
That impulse was in one sense quite proper. It would be ridiculous to sentimentalise Ian Paisley's career. Most of it was characterised by sectarian bigotry, by hatred of liberals and homosexuals (he started the Save Ulster from Sodomy campaign in 1977) and by a relentless exploitation of the fears that he himself did so much to stoke.
His formidable talents as an orator, his brilliant instincts for agitation, his instinctive understanding of publicity, his broad but biting wit, his enormous charisma – all of these were deployed largely for the destruction of any non-sectarian common ground in Northern Ireland.
From Terence O'Neill to David Trimble, he haunted every unionist compromiser like an accusing ghost, pointing his finger at treason, sell-out and accommodation with an enemy that was not just political but spiritual. He inflamed the passions of a specifically Protestant paranoia, drawing his biblical inspiration much more from the Book of Revelations than from the Sermon on the Mount.
His greatest talent was for simultaneously stirring up trouble and disavowing its consequences.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlbmIMbKZa4

[seafoid]

Susan McKay

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/there-can-be-no-doubt-that-certain-words-ian-paisley-spoke-sent-men-out-to-kill-1.1927558

But sad too about the lives that were squandered due to the destructive politics Paisley relentlessly hammered into his people. His booming voice ricocheted off the Armagh drumlins when he preached at Drumcree, and Billy Wright and his gang loaded up their guns, another generation of sectarian killers led to believe that God was on their side.

It was a voice I'd been hearing since it boomed across the fields from the Free Presbyterian church when I was a child in Derry. It was macho and outrageous and scary, but there was a strong element of vaudeville about it too. Women tittered at his jokes about good Protestants breeding to beat the Catholics. Men chuckled and said the "Big Man" said it like it was.

Listening to the tributes, the slimiest from Alastair Campbell, the most difficult and stiffly dignified from Peter Robinson, the most poignant from Martin McGuinness, I remembered the three little Quinn brothers, burned to death in their home in Ballymoney after apocalyptic warnings from Paisley over the rights of the Orange Order at Drumcree.

I remembered Billy Mitchell, a forlorn former loyalist paramilitary who told me he'd been into rock and roll until he started going to Paisley's rallies in the 1960s and dropped rocking round the clock in favour of preparing for doomsday. He killed two men and never forgave himself.

I remembered Mrs Reavey from Whitecross, whose sons were murdered by loyalists. She died a few years ago still waiting for Paisley to apologise for saying they were in the IRA when he knew well that they were not.

The poet Tom Paulin described him as "a complex and protean personality". My friend Bill Brown, who has written a (yet to be published) book about being an acolyte of the big gangly young preacher as a youth, says there were always many Paisleys (though only ever one Eileen).

As a reporter on the beat, I met him many times but never had a conversation with him. Our mirror images were introduced once in the make-up room at the BBC in Belfast. We nodded, then turned and shook hands politely. He was still in his "never" days then.

A friend told me that he had told someone else, who told her, that my book Northern Protestants – An Unsettled People was a good book, though he didn't agree with it. I admit it – I was thrilled.

Paisley was not the only armchair general who fired people up into sectarian hatred and then sat back to watch the flames. His most bigoted followers felt betrayed when he did a volte-face on no surrender and compromised with the enemy. He let them go, as he had let so many others go in the past.

The final television interview showed him an old man in failing health, disappointed that the power he finally gained had not lasted forever.

Best say of Paisley that he did harm, great harm, but he changed, and for that we must be grateful.

[bennydorano]

You'd have thought this would have been a 30 pager of venom & quite possibly would have been if it had have occurred 15 / 20 years ago.

I feel nothing, don't care.